Better late than never: "With more than 1500 improvements since the first beta release of the 1.5 series, the KOffice developers invite the user community for the final round of testing of KOffice 1.5 before the first release candidate. Read the full announcement, the changelog, download the release, and give it some real world testing for us!"

To be honest, I doubt we'll ever get really, really good support for MS file formats, unless we manage to get some funding to pay a dozen full-time developers. And then we'll find that the game has changed and Microsoft has a new file format that we're not going to be allowed to implement. It's a game we cannot win. That said, this release does bring some improvements to our set of filters: powerpoint, illustrator and html filters have improved a lot, as have jpeg, png and tiff for Krita.

As for Krita, I've pretty much decided not to bother with trying to support the Photoshop file format any better than I do now. The only public spec available only describes up to version 6. Any later format is closed and would have to be reverse engineered. Instead, I intend to start working on an OpenDocument spec for layered raster images after the 1.5 release.

But there's still plenty of room for KOffice. You could build a little bit of OpenOffice automation to do conversions to OpenDocument. And my daughters, for instance, use KWord and KPresenter for their school papers and presentations. KWord's frames are really good for that since they make sure images stay put where they want, instead of moving all over the place as in some other word processors.